Dos Passos

That's a quote from my 1945 copy of First Encounter a book that's actually a reprint of his first novel One Man's Initiation.It was written about WWI and he had it reprinted in the middle of WWII.  He meant it politically as he did most things.  John Dos Passos had his career ruined by politics, but it was he who was so overtly to be political When the tides shifted on McCarthy, he failed to roll back.

"Red sweating faces, drooping under the hard rims of helmets, turned to the ground with the struggle with the weight of equipment; rows and patches of faces were the only warmth in the desolation of putty-coloured mud and bowed mud-coloured bodies and dripping mud-coloured sky." 

In that short quote he uses a lot of repetition. Repetition is a tool. Over-use is common, but Dos Passos was a master. He first describes each noun as it passes except "ground."  Red faces, hard rims, ... then does not describe the ground. But then used that ground to describe everything else: putty colored mud, mud-colored bodies, mud-colored sky.  It's perfectly balanced.

Fante and Bandini

I am not the first person to blog about this book. Hard to say who was first but the best was over at Mooks and Gripes.I however, fixate on a single sentence. It's what I do here.  This book was made into a film in 1989. I've never seen it.  It is probably the best known of John Fante's books.

The book was first published in 1938.  You cant tell. There's nothing dated about the language. It was reprinted in 1983 by John Martin's Black Sparrow Press.

"The world of inanimate things found voice, conversed with the old house, and the house chattered with cronish delight of the discontent within its walls."

Brilliant anthropomorphizing.the phrase "the world of inanimate things" is particularly powerful. They do have their own world wholly separate, silent and insentient. We are be-ing, and they are certainly not. Here he used it all to characterize the absence of a person, this is reflected by a secondary character projecting this sense of absence onto the inanimate.

Bruce Chatwin

"Mosquitoes bit the hard parts of my fingers."

Bruce Chatwin wrote that in Niger in 1971. The lines were published posthumously in 1993 in the book Photographs and Notebooks.  It's only 8 words but it says so much. It reminds me of the more famous six word sentence by Hemingway.

He avoids calling them callouses a charge word with a lot of connotations that are no longer there. Their presence indicates his hard living and manual labor. The mosquitoes are plural, not singular.  he's out-numbered, and that he passively lets them bite indicates either patience, indifference or masochism.

It's what I'd expect from the author of In Patagonia.

Words Are Tyrants

"...words are tyrannical things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will not pay attention to these, you cannot pay attention at all."

 -W. Somerset Maugham.  (The Summing Up)

What can you add to that?  The Summing Up was his autobiography and his statement on the world as he knew it. I have a nice old hardback copy from 1938. He'd write another 26 books in the next 24 years strangely putting it in the middle of his career. His biggest most enduring books The Razors Edge and Of Human Bondage weren't published until 1944 and 1946 respectively.  So in reading his words it is doubly interested to read what he thought of words, and most especially his own words. More here.

Larrouy, Maurice

Maurice's name appears nowhere in the book. he is credited at the time merely as "Y." It's a collection of letters, one half of an exchange between two men each serving in WWI aboard a different ship. We are left with only one half presumably because one of the ships was sunk. The reciprocated letters went down with him. It's all public domain now. You can get this book "the Odyssey of a Torpedoed transport" free here.

"They were exhausted. Some of them almost died, they were spitting blood. And as they were cold, bronchitis and inflammation of the lungs had set in. The only physician they had was Fourges, which means none at all. As a remedy he gave them rum in hot water, for our medicine chest had soon been emptied. Three of them died, which is not many, say the officers. We threw them overboard into the Atlantic with a sack of coal at their feet to make them sink."

Maurice had a gift for nearly awkward understatement. In an odd way that communicated many of the things that were otherwise left unsaid. Turn of the century British writing is usually very stiff, even dull or drab. these are personal letter and they have a more informal feel that helps keep the truth poignant.

Outerbridge Reach

I've remembered part of this quote for 18 years and finally tonight put together what it came from. I dont recall how I came to possess the book, Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone, but I recall it was brand new when I read it.

"On the drive they passed a burning cane field and Indian cattle grazing under swarms of flies among ruined vines. The earth was blood red, the vegetation fleshy. Everything was death and fecundity."

It was the perfect words twisted into another meaning. Death and fecundity are used in biology to describe life cycles. In reality I think everything is death or fecundity, but Stone wrote what he meant. Ultimately his book Dog Soldiers was better, but never more elegant than this..

Rebecca West

I don't know a damn thing abotu Rebecca West. Black Lamb and Grey falcon was published in 1940. Mine is a hard copy from 1944. the beast of a book is 1,150 pages long. But from this one book alone I knew she was fervently political Black Lamb.org described her thusly:

"A vivacious, politically-committed woman, West began writing in radical periodicals while still a student at George Watson’s Ladies’ College in Edinburgh and took her pen name from one of Ibsen’s emancipated heroines. Her early novels and critical studies, excellent in themselves, nevertheless seem preludes to her masterwork Black Lamb and Grey Falcon..."

So here we have that very book and it is as they say.

"...If I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years I would always hear "No, there was fear, there were our enemies, without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death."

Giscombe

Giscombe is a poet first and foremost. I don't care for much poetry, and not his in particular; just poerty at all. Where I find allegory and metaphor very descriptive, I find poetry to be code. I find no pleasure in reading or writing in code. So C.S. Giscombe is not one I'd have encountered had he not branched out into prose. I bought this book for $3 because I liked a single passage and afterward read it and went onto enjoy it as a whole.

Into and Out of dislocation is a book about a hundred things: America, Canada, blackness, genealogy, teaching, writing, history, travel, research, sex, good food, bad food, drinking bourbon, mass transit, bicycling... It's disjointed like Saroyan. But skillfully tied together by a tight first-person narrative. The single quote follows. The italics are his, the bold is mine.

"I'm here to reclaim him, I wrote in my journal that winter in Fort George. This is the dry hump of kinship, my arrival at the public dock at Germansen Landing or Fort George or the mouth of Quesnelle to reclaim his ass. "

Sudden Sea

R.A. Scotti has great one-liners. it's very strange to think that her career began in writing spy and detective novels. Her prose isn't dense, it reads easily but then she'll drop a stone into your drink. She uses them artfully using them to slam on the brakes or the accelerator. In non-fiction it's unusual in it's poetry.

"All along the Northeast coast, riled by the wind, the sea became magnificent and mad."

It's simple and visual and it works with the alliteration. The clausulas are different but the near-rhyme is interesting. I like alliteration because it's difficult to use and when you fail you sound foolish. It's very satisfying when it works; and this works.

Read Everything

A complete list of the books I read in 2009 in Chronological order.

1. Karen Blixen - Seven Gothic tales
2. Philip Roth - Everyman
3. Don Mitchell - Four Stroke
4. William Saroyan - My name is Aram
5. Steven Kurutz - Like a rolling stone
6. Larry Zuckerman - The Potato
7. Ken Kesey - Once Flew over the cuckoos nest
8. Leonard Wolfe - Sowing: An Autobiography Of The Years 1880-1904
9. Betty Jeffery - White Coolies
10. Jamaica Kincaid - A Small Place
11. Howard S. Becker - Outsiders
12. Rockwell Kent - N by E
13. J.G. Ballard - Crash
14. Ira Judson Condit - Fig varieties: a monograph
15. Erich Kahler - Disintegration of Form in the Arts
16. Ernest Hemingway - By Line
17. Robert Ruark - Something of Value
18. Alan Lomax - Mr. Jelly Roll
19. Mark Baker - Nam
20. John Clellon Holmes - Go
21. M. Ageyev - Novel with Cocaine
22. Felix Feneon - Novels in Three Lines
23. Nathanael West – Miss Lonely Hearts & The Day of the Locust
24. Mezz Mezzerow – Really the Blues
25. Gary Marmorstein - The Label: The Story of Columbia Records
26. George Gaylord Simpson – Attending Marvels: A Patagonian Journal
27. Philippe Diole - Okapi Fever
28. Eugene O'Neil - the Emperor Jones
29. Steve Almond - My life in Heavy Metal
30. James J. Davis - the Iron Puddler
31. William Burroughs - The Burroughs File
32. Christopher Morley - Exlibris
33. Aage Krarup-Nielsen - Hell Beyond the High Seas
34. W.H. Hudson - Tales of the Pampas
35. Alejo Carpentier - The Lost Steps
36. David W. Elliot - Listen to the Silence
37. Charles Michael Boland - They all Discovered America
38. Harry Frankfort - Bullshit
39. Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres
40. Lazlo Beke - A Students Diary: Budapest 1956
41. Jack Paar - I kid you not
42. John O'Brien - Better
43: Nick Tosches - In the Hand of Dante
44: Ludwig Lewisohn - Upstream
45: Andre Gide - The Immoralist
46: Lester Bangs - Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
47: Steve Almond - Candy Freak
48: John McPhee – The Pine Barrens
49: John Fahey – How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life
50 Daniel Duane - Looking for Mo
51. Josephine Johnson - now in November
52. Scott Huler - Defining the Wind
53. Walter Yetnikoff - Howling at the Moon
54. Robert Ruark - The Old Man and the Boy
55. Linda Stratmann - Chloroform: the Quest for Oblivion
56. Theodore Roosevelt - Hunting Trips of a Ranchman & Hunting trips on the Prairie and in the Mountains
57. Elliott Schwartz - Electronic Music a Listeners Guide
58. Henry Miller – the air conditioned nightmare
59. Mary King ODonnell – Those Other People
60. William Warner - Beautiful Swimmers : Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay
61. Bill Hicks - Love All The People
62. Caleb Earle - Martha Furnace Diary
63. Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim
64. Grace, Beverly & Charles Smith - Through the Kitchen Door
65. James A. Michener - The Quality of Life
66. Meredith Wilson - And There I stood with my Piccolo
67. Susan Seligson - Going with the Grain
68. David Yeadon - Secluded Islands of the Atlantic Coast
69. P.V. Glob – The Bog People
70. Ernet Hemingway - Green Hills of Africa

Beautiful Swimmers

William W. Warner died last year and is often the case I come upon these works after it's too late to ever ask the author themselves. Beautiful Swimmers has been in print continually since 1976, and rightly so. He wrote one other work abotu the sea Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman which was very similar to Beautiful Swimmers but with a different region of fishermen. He also published a collection of short stories that was quite good and strangely a dull as dry oatmeal treatise on Catholicism.

The strength of Warners work is in it's clean prose. This passage could have been reams longer detailing the disappointment, the emptiness or the dead grasses surrounding the square patch of bate earth. Instead Warner says everything by saying very little.

"Reaching Wenona, I was surprised to find an empty lot where Corbin's trailer home had formerly stood. Only a few cinder blocks of the foundation, a broken child's tricycle and some rusty crab pots remained."

And he spake of trees

The first is untitled. The second takes it 's title from Kings 4:33. "And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes."

Davide Sar is a total unknown, at least I think he is. It could always be a pseudonym. But I found two of his self-published poetry collections in a box of books at a thrift store. The carbon paper and a letter inside approximately date the works to the early 1970s.

One had some notes in it on carbon paper that I can only assume to be his own notes, the start of future work perhaps. His mind is a very strange place. Please take some time to visit it.

You can download his two books below:
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO

library tag from 1890

Lord Jim

"Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb—the revolt of his young life—the black end."

Joseph Conrad was everything they say he was: Victorian, racist, German, English, arrogant but also brilliant Lord Jim was first published in 1899, and has not been diminished by time. It's a bit flowery compared to modern writing but still compelling. It mystifies me that this followed Heart of darkness and I read only now that he co-wrote not one but three books with For Maddox Ford.. who's prose I find dull.

Roosevelt

A quote over 100 years old and still funny.

President Theodore Roosevelt was possibly the best writer among all our elected leaders. He was a naturalist and a historian, and he couldn't write about one without mentioning the other. Seeing as most of his works were first published in the 1890s they are all in the public domain now. Hell, some of this is so old, his biographies are public domain too.

This one comes from "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman." Mine is the Statesman Edition printed in 1904, part of a sizable set. For the price of the set I could have bought an ebook reader and downloaded them all for free. Damn my obstinacy. Luddites pay a premium.

"We rested a couple of hours as noon for lunch, and the afternoon's sport was simply a repetition of the morning's except that we had but one dog to work with; for shortly after mid-day the stub-tail pointer, for his sins, encountered a skunk, with which he waged prompt and vailant battle-thereby rendering himself useless as a servant and highly offensive as a companion."

Since it's public domain you can download it here.

But there are other fine works:
Outdoor pastimes of an American hunter
Lassoing wild animals in Africa
Life-histories of African game animals
Hunting the Grisly
Hunting in many lands
Animal life in Africa
Hunting Trips on the prairie and on the mountains
African Game Trails

And Archive.org has a lovely collection of free ebooks here.

Those Other People

Mary King O'Donnell, I know nothing of her. I know she was a Texan, born in Houston who moved to San Francisco in 1943. Her first husband died, and her second husband was a Communist. the details don't connect at all and paint no cohesive picture. Her writing, what I've seen of it, is simple and spare but she seems to stumble into the true picture of things- fixating on small background details like Hemingway often did.

"The young negro man in the pink shirt had bought a watermelon. He was splitting it open with his clasp-knife. Squatted on his haunches on the sidewalk, he was cutting the red heart out of the green skin, lifting the heart on the point of his knife in the sunlight. Aloft on the knife blade, the red heart quivered and blazed...Across the street, the colored ban in the pink shirt still squatted beside the watermelon. He had eaten the heart , and now he was scraping the last of the pink meat away from the rind. the last bite poised on his knife blade and disappeared into his mouth... The man stood up and wiped the knife blade on his leg. He shoved the rind into the gutter with his foot, put the knife in his pocket and walked away."

I splice together the character's three brief appearances there. The image is vivid, but bitter-sweet. O'Donnell was a Southerner 6 decades ago. She was probably a bigot. Today the image of black man + watermelon is a classic bigoted caricature. the paragraphs tell me as much about the story as the writer.

Martha Furnace Diary

This is a transcript from a diary kept at Martha Furnace in Martha N.J. recording daily events covering a period from March 30, 1808 to the end of April 1815. It was written , presumably by a series of clerks in the Martha Forge office The original diary is lost. After being discovered in an office safe it was destroyed in a fire in 1910. but not before two copies of it were made. More here. These early copies have survived. The Hagley Museum and Library has been disseminating the diary in part and in whole. Here I collect what I beleive to be the whole diary, formatted for what I think is best readability as a pdf.. These early copies have survived. The Hagley Museum and Library has been disseminating the diary in part and in whole. Here I collect what I beleive to be the whole diary, formatted for what I think is best readability as a pdf.

You can get all 94 pages if you

DOWNLOAD HERE

Up Stream

Ludwig Lewisohn is largely forgotten. He was a novelist, and an occasional writer of schlock when it came time to pay the bills. (hence the image) In this autobiographical work he cleaves the gap between the two. He was one of the founders of Brandeis University. This work Up Steam, feels somewhat dated with it's ornate Victorian language. But in certain places he compels his feelings with great clarity.

Specifically, I like the way he breaks up the times of his work shift; spelling out his hours both before and after his lunch break. It just emphasizes his discomfort in just being there. It says that he is literally counting the hours without resorting to the idiom. Being there pains him, everything there is ugly to him, the job repulses him. Outstanding.

"I can, at least, see the sun and think my own thoughts. And there arises in me the memory of that large, scientifically clean building filled with the hum of the engine that drove the monotype machine and with the acrid odor of fresh print. A sharp electric light burned over my desk from eight-thirty to twelve-thirty and from one-thirty to five-thirty, and next to me stood all day a long, loose fellow whose small, pointed head seemed fairly to dangle and tremble, like an ugly and noxious flower, at the end of his scrawny neck."

When he wanted to he could drop the flowery language. In 1933, he said that "...the entire Nazi movement is in fact and by certain aspects of its avowed ideology drenched through and through with homo-erotic feeling and practice."

Authors We Enjoyed

1000 Acres

It won the damn Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1991. It's King Lear for a new epoch.

"So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn't forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you cant stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That's my sole, solitary lonely accomplishment."

I am not worthy.